The connected campus is the proving ground for smart cities. Hardly confined to higher education, connected campuses include medical and technology parks as well as corporate campuses and airports that are miniature smart cities. In addition to highly connected workspaces, smart campuses such as those owned by Google and Apple include childcare, sports and recreational facilities, cafeterias, health-care facilities and smart transportation systems.
There’s currently no dictionary definition of a smart building, though we seem to be moving towards a shared understanding that for a building to be considered ‘smart’, it should use technology to deliver useful, consistent, user focused experiences as well as space and energy efficiencies. We can contrast this with ‘connected’ and ‘intelligent’ buildings,
Real estate investment trust Bleutech Park Properties announced plans for a $7.5 billion project in the Las Vegas Valley that will showcase a range of smart city technology, from autonomous vehicles to internet of things (IoT) devices to smart buildings with “self-healing concrete.” The project will break ground in December and is projected to take six years to complete.
Fixing the integration problem is fast becoming a key challenge for the smart building sector to overcome according to many experts. “Successful digital transformation is like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. It’s still the same organism, but it now has superpowers,” says George Westerman, a research scientist at the MIT Center for Digital Business. When digital transformation is done wrong, however, “all you have is a really fast caterpillar,” he points out, “and it’s hard to keep up with your competitors if you’re crawling ahead while they can fly.”
The rise of connected things within smart buildings has led many CRE firms to embark on a new kind of digital transformation. However, the ROI for many organizations has been elusive, particularly because IoT platforms require significant development costs to address their business potential.
The smart-building industry is starting to consolidate. This increased maturation of the market will be good for many players, with fragmentation having held back the smart-building industry. The value proposition for smart-building technology is larger than that of energy efficiency, with the energy management sector, in particular, serving as a barometer for the smart-building industry as a whole.
The IoT is a broad term that defines anything connected as part of a network, capable of both sending and receiving data. The majority of this network is based on sensors, and it’s these devices that will power Energy-as-a-Service. Current energy production focuses on a centralized grid and while it has served us well in the past, decentralized microgrids are emerging to prevent power disruptions, monitor energy usage and even transition into green energy.
As buildings become more connected, complex, and dynamic, there is a growing need for intelligent building technologies that provide data-driven insights to maximize operational efficiency, cut energy waste, and lower overall costs. This paper explores how smart buildings leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to create new opportunities for information gathering and sharing, and the impact it has on buildings management and operations.
